Articles

Articles from Helen

Check out what Helen has written about the state of genre fiction.

“We are living in weird times. As I write, a snap election in the UK has just shocked the nation with another upending of the pollsters’ predictions and the future seems very uncertain. In moments such as this, time itself seems out of joint. We need new tools to interrogate our present moment. We need a new language to understand it, to articulate our concerns, our hopes, our dreams — our possibilities. The writers within this volume have been, first and foremost, witnesses to their world. Their stories suggest a new language, not only for weird fiction, but for a contemporary fiction that looks for new answers in unexpected places.” — “The State of the Weird”, Weird Fiction Review

“In a recent interview following the publication of Revival, a Lovecraftian novel about a minister who loses his faith, King said he believed “in evil”, but he has for all his life “gone back and forth about whether or not there’s an outside evil, whether or not there’s a force in the world that really wants to destroy us, from the inside out, individually and collectively.” The Devil of “The Man in the Black Suit” is an outside force, but it isn’t purely religious, to my mind, nor is he the accrual of bad forces, of crimes and transgressions, manifested in novels such as ‘Salem’s Lot (1975) or It(1986).” — The Only Lights are Headlights: 101 Weird Writers – Stephen King, Weird Fiction Review

““The Specialist’s Hat” has become a touchstone for a number of overlapping literary movements (magic realism, slipstream, interstitial, metafiction, fabulation, weird fiction), and there is good reason for this. It infuses tropes drawn from Gothic tales such as Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto or ghost stories such as M. R. James’s classic “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” with a playfully postmodern sensibility. The story has a peculiar lightness to it, as it weaves together children’s games, fairy tales, oral histories, and snatches of poetry whose deliberate awfulness amuses us even as it unsettles us.” — Sex, Death and the Man-Omelet in “The Specialist’s Hat”: 101 Weird Writers – Kelly Link, Weird Fiction Review

“A story works in the same way as a joke does, and also in the same way that a magic trick does: through misdirection and sleight of hand, by lulling readers when they are most tense, by changing the rules just when they feel most secure, and by playing scenes against type. . .” — “The H Word: Dissonance and Horror” at Nightmare Magazine

“What impressed me most about Allan’s novel is how the layers upon layers of history are intuitively pressed against one another. It operates by night-time logic, a term coined by the short story writer Kelly Link, which refers to the kind of fiction guided by principles that can only be grasped intuitively, or in other words, stories that feel right even if they don’t make outward sense. In The Race, individual histories are reassembled, reiterated, and recontextualized as the borders between fact and fiction dissolve.” — “Infinite Worlds, Ordinary and Extraordinary”:review of The Race by Nina Allan at the Los Angeles Review of Books

“Experimental Film lives in the flicker between light and darkness, shifting between glimpses of the grim nigrescence of a hostile universe punctuated by dazzling bursts of empathy and love. Traditionally, those horror protagonists who catch sight even briefly of the naked malevolence of the world tend to die, go mad, or forget what they have seen. But Files offers a fourth alternative: meaningful survival, accepting responsibility for those around you, getting on with your chosen work. You might think of it as optimistic nihilism. This renewed sense of what horror fiction can do will resonate deeply for readers who find themselves overwhelmed by the increasingly prominent and disturbing images of the real world. From an author who has already established herself as one of the genre’s most original and innovative voices, Experimental Film is a remarkable achievement.” — “Spectres of the Silver Screen”:review of Experimental Film by Gemma Files at the Los Angeles Review of Books

“Europe at Midnight is high-powered fiction of the cleverest sort, mining the rich vein opened up by Philip K. Dick’s classic The Man in the High Castle as well as Lavie Tidhar’s provocative new novel A Man Lies Dreaming. Hutchinson’s keen sense of irony and his sheer imaginative exuberance set him apart from the recent wave of dystopian authors presenting ever bleaker visions of the future. He does more than simply expose the danger that Europe’s cultural and political divisiveness represents; he revels in the potential it offers for literary play. His riff on the Cold War–style spy thrillers of John le Carré comes across as remarkably current, and therein lies his greatest trick: reminding his readers that the specters of the political past continue to haunt us, as much in the guise of potential tragedy as colorful kitsch.“— “Kitsch Meets Kafka”:review of Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson at the Los Angeles Review of Books

“Sing Me Your Scars is not always a pleasant read. It’s hard not to squirm as the women in these stories are crucified, stabbed, beaten, bruised, surgically altered, and incised. But Walters gives her blend of body horror and splatterpunk a poetic treatment that elevates it from grindhouse to arthouse. Like the best horror fiction, this collection is at once subversive and invested in the peculiar delights of the genre. The result is a full-body experience, packed with gasps and shivers, pulse-pounding jolts and moments of intense instinctive recoil — shocking, yes, but completely enthralling and oddly uplifting as well.”— “Beautiful Broken Bodies”: review of Sing Me Your Scars by Damien Angelica Walters at the Los Angeles Review of Books

“. . . Write your obsession. Write your kink. Write the thing that keeps you up at three AM, the thing that your girlfriend tells you is weird, the thing that deep down is most you at that stage of your life.” — Write Your Kink, CBC Books: Canada Writes

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I gratefully acknowledge the Ontario Arts Council for supporting a draft of Hair Side, Flesh Side through the Writer's Works in Progress Grant, the Canada Council for a Writing Grant, and the Toronto Arts Council for a Level Two Writer's Grant.